Dana Stevens

Aiming for lighthearted, bittersweet charm, But Forever in My Mind slips into predictability and condescension.

As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.

Works best when it sticks with the gentle humor and pathos of its literary source.

Works best as a bang-and- boom action picture, a loud symphony of bombardment and explosion juiced up with frantic editing and shiny computer-generated imagery.

In essence, it's a ragged collection of bits and sketches cobbled into about a dozen plots, most of which call upon the cast to do a lot of tongue and neck-spraining French kissing.

The Holy Girl may occasionally frustrate your desire for clarity and order, but in the end it will reward your patience, and you leave the theater in a state of quiet awe.

Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.

A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.

Immerses you in violence and agony, but it may leave you with a curious feeling of detachment.

One thing is for sure: The über-dream is both gorgeously animated, in Kon's shimmering, hyperreal style, and sickeningly scary.

Mr. Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence, but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd, feverish integrity.

The actor's (Murray) quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism.

In a culture apparently defined by lap dancing, ersatz architectural sublimity and the virtual contact of cyberspace, how do we know what is real? The Center of the World, for example, is as phony as can be.

Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano etude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.

It represents something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful.

As Passionada ambles toward a formulaic fairy-tale ending, it exudes such giddy self-assurance that you wish you could believe in it.

An autopsy for The Town would list multiple causes of death.

A tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.

Not only is it excruciatingly boring -- but its central premises are so banal and dubious as to border on offensiveness.

An exemplary work of cinéma vérité that allows its subjects to speak for themselves, traffics neither in pity nor in political grandstanding.

Tight, sober and strangely comical.

Not a bad movie, and its intentions are unimpeachable. But its sentimentality is so relentless and its narrative so predictable that the life is very nearly squeezed out of it.

The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook.

Succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story.

Inconsequential documentary.

The one-liners are clever enough and the physical comedy and pop-culture goofing sufficiently dumb and broad to make Undercover Brother, a reasonably pleasant experience.

Take this as a warning: it's not much fun.

Its most winning attribute is a kind of sloppy, unassuming friendliness, a likability aptly reflected in its characters.

Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant.

Conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling.

At the end of Inception, I hadn't lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I'd seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.

Shot in smeary video, it sports the static, by-the-book camera work of a daytime soap-opera.

Miranda is played by Meryl Streep, an actress who carries nuance in her every pore, and who endows even her lighthearted comic roles with a rich implication of inner life. With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, Ms. Streep's Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe.

Rarely have I been so acutely aware of a movie's softness and sentimentality, and rarely have I minded less. Some of the credit surely goes to Mr. Hanks...His performance is so easy and amiable that its nuances emerge only in retrospect.

The story is laughably incoherent, which would be less bothersome if the movie were not also so unremittingly pretentious.

The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.

It never pretends that it's anything more than trashy, cheesy fun. But even trash -- especially trash this expensive -- should at least be well made. Sure, it's easy on the eyes, but would a little brains be too much to ask?

It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.

A thin, pleasant teenage heist comedy with a chewy nugget of social criticism buried inside it.

Strange, intense and moving -- one of the few truly grown-up movies you're likely to see this year.

Ms. Polley is a naturally subtle actress, and part of her appeal lies in an unusual ability to seem at once forthright and enigmatic, but this time she comes off as a bit smug.

It's not heaven, exactly, but after the purgatory of the late summer movie season, it may be close enough.

A thin and unsatisfying concoction that somehow manages to make one of the richest and most durable sources of culture-clash comedy into an occasion for dullness.

There is nothing quite like this movie, and I'm not altogether sure there is much more to it than its lovely peculiarity. But at a moment when so many films strive to be obvious and interchangeable as possible, it is gratifying to find one that is puzzling, subtle and handmade.

A howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless style.

Mr. Condon's great achievement is to turn Kinsey's complicated and controversial career into a grand intellectual drama.

Works hard at being charming, but comedy is best when it looks effortless.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

Certainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence.

Beauty Shop extends the popular "Barbershop" franchise to Atlanta and provides a sassy feminine counterpart to its cozy men's-club vibe.

For the most part, it works beautifully as a movie without sacrificing the integrity of the opera.

At the end, when they have created a vibrant new theater program for their school, their sense of triumph is infectious. " 'Our Town' Is Ghetto!" one of them exults. Thornton Wilder, wherever he is, would understand and take it as a compliment.

The movie itself evolves in reverse, starting life as a moderately clever grab bag of high-concept noodling and half-witty badinage before descending into the primordial ooze of explosions and elaborate lower- intestinal gags.

It is a beautifully made film - decorously composed, meticulously acted, cleanly photographed. But all of these qualities make it seem complacent and hypocritical when it wants to be honest and brave, and sentimental rather than emotionally daring.

(Garvy) has helped advance our understanding of a difficult and exhilarating time.

It is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.

Sophie, in both her incarnations, joins an impressive sisterhood of Miyazaki heroines, whose version of girl power presents a potent alternative to the mini-machismo that dominates American juvenile entertainment. Not that children are the only viewers likely to be haunted and beguiled by Howl's Moving Castle - all that is needed are open eyes and an open heart.

While not especially good - judged strictly on its cinematic merits, it ranges from O.K. to god-awful - it is still a fascinating cultural document in the age of intelligent design.

The movie is a little claustrophobic -- a marathon of conference calls, frenzied pointing and clicking, and office pep talks.

Helen Mirren is a goddess of an actress, and her Queen Elizabeth is maddening, hilarious, and deeply human, galumphing around the Balmoral estate in a tartan raincoat and waders as the Britain she thought she knew crumbles around her.

Offers a view of pornography that is nonjudgmental, even celebratory, but at the same time its premise -- that Danielle must be rescued from the shame and degradation of her old job -- suggests a more traditional, disapproving point of view. Instead of addressing this contradiction, the movie is happy to wallow in it, which would be fine if it had any real pleasure to offer.

The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.

Some of the scenes are like mislaid puzzle pieces, and they snap into place only when all three movies have been seen and absorbed. This makes watching any one of the episodes both more interesting and more frustrating than it might otherwise be, since a portion of dramatic satisfaction is always withheld.

This film may disappoint some dogmatic Old Hogwartsians: a few plot points have been sacrificed, and Mr. Cuarón does not seem to care much for Quidditch. But it more than compensates for these lapses with its emotional force and visual panache.

A slight, amusing documentary.

The movie is quiet, modest and sympathetic almost to a fault; its scenes of emotional discord, accompanied by a swooning, sniffling score, seem best suited to cable television. It's like a Lifetime movie about men.

This is not just a movie-within-a-movie, but a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie, something that sounds unbearably arch but that is swift, funny and surprisingly unpretentious.

That El Perro is so unassuming is part of what makes its humane, sympathetic story so satisfying.

Seeing Killer of Sheep is an experience as simple and indelible as watching Bresson's "Pickpocket" or De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" for the first time. Despite its aesthetic debt to European art cinema, Burnett's film is quintessentially American in its tone and subject matter. If there's any modern-day equivalent for the movie's matter-of-fact gaze on the ravages of urban poverty, it's the HBO series "The Wire."

The Bourne Identity, like its hero, triumphs through sheer unreflective professionalism. It is, by today's standards, a modest thriller, with a self-contained storyline and with very few big special effects.

An average romantic comedy put together with enough professionalism to keep your cynicism momentarily at bay, featuring good-looking actors who also, in this case, seem like pretty nice people.

A fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he (Capote) pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin.

A very funny movie, alive with a sense of absurdity and human foible.

The film chronicles an astonishing career...Mr. Van Peebles is that rarest of modern creatures: a free man.

Just My Luck is a bit of lukewarm cappuccino froth confected to float Ms. Lohan to the next stage of her career.

By the time this movie's over, you've spent an hour and a half just working your way through the words of Howl and some related source material, and that turns out to be a surprisingly satisfying thing to do.

Every shot seems measured for maximum effect, and when the pace suddenly quickens in a late action sequence on a deserted subway train, it results in a moment of pure Hitchcockian panic that reverberates like thunder in the fretful, melancholy air.

Will provide preschoolers with comfort and amusement, though not rapture or enchantment.

The film is a triumph of mood and implication.

What distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing -- which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats -- and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance. She treats the character neither as a case study nor as an opportunity to show off her range, but rather as a completely ordinary and therefore arrestingly complicated person.

A searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world. Mr. Junkerman's film is best understood as a necessary, if partisan, text in that continuing argument.

The movie's warmth, and Mr. Gilliam's sober, likable performance sustain it through its ragged stretches and amateurish lapses.

Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.

The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.

Mr. Im's own aesthetic command is evident in the movie's wealth of beautiful, perfectly framed images of nature -- shots so full of passion and perception that they could almost be paintings themselves.

There is a real subject here, and it is handled with intelligence and care.

Blandly charming.

So wrenching and absorbing that you can easily lose sight of the sophistication of its techniques.

Never quite comes to dramatic or comic life.

Shows so much intelligence and compassion that its tendency sometimes to overreach or underdramatize can surely be forgiven.

Has a ghoulish wit. It's not as cheekily knowing as the "Scream" movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the "Evil Dead" franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand.

The most pleasing paradox in Storytelling -- a determinedly paradoxical and, in spite of much of what I've said here, a genuinely pleasing movie -- is that it sets out to debunk this notion and ends up affirming it.

Leans a bit too much toward the lachrymose and has a wrong-note final image.

Imagine "Last Tango in Paris" remade as a wan, low-budget romantic comedy.

The very confusion that has made him (Rock) so unpredictable and funny onstage makes this on-screen exploration of contemporary racial mythologies curiously tentative and unfocused.

Trudges along the well-trod path of high-minded, schematic storytelling.

It aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time.

Moves with fluidity and ease through brisk opening conventions to a perfectly poised and balanced endgame.

Qualifies as one of my favorite movies of all time. This 1932 masterpiece, now digitally restored with retranslated subtitles and a newly recorded score, is a silent film that doesn't feel silent at all.

All the drinking, arguing and brooding, which in lesser hands might have produced oppressive and unvarying dreariness, somehow adds up to a tableau of extraordinary vividness and variety.

Emotionally incoherent.

Indefensible, cynical, even grotesque; it is also pure -- that is to say innocent and uncorrupted -- fun.

The film's last half-hour -- or do I mean its final two weeks? -- is meant to keep the audience sniffling and sobbing uncontrollably, but the only thing likely to elicit tears is the sight of Mr. Reeves dressed in a white dinner jacket crooning "Time After Time."

From a technical standpoint, Taking Lives is competent and sometimes even impressive. It is cleanly edited and nicely shot -- at times as cool and rich as a York Peppermint Pattie. Beyond that, there is not much to say.

Its lack of subtlety is clearly a point of pride, and Mr. Hensleigh's flat-footed, hard-punching style has a blunt ferocity that makes "Kill Bill" look like "In the Bedroom."

To watch Millennium Actress is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.

Dreamy touches can't compensate for the film's main flaw, which is that the relationship between the two main characters never really develops.

Delicate, quietly devastating.

What makes Clerks II both winning and (somewhat unexpectedly) moving is its fidelity to the original "Clerks" ethic of hanging out, talking trash and refusing all worldly ambition.

Like the great films of the 1930's and early 40's, it is at once artful and unpretentious, sophisticated and completely accessible, sure of its own authority and generous toward characters and audience alike -- a movie whose intended public is the human race.

The director serves up a nice helping of blarney, but he seems to have left his schmaltz in Baltimore.

This may be the coach's story, but to the extent that Coach Carter is interesting rather than merely inspirational, it's because of the team.

Even though Love's Labour's Lost is, in showbiz terms, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, you wouldn't trade it for a pot of gold.

With its likable blue-collar characters and its unpretentious exuberance, Everybody's Famous is reminiscent of recent British comedies like "Brassed Off" and "The Full Monty."

The second half of the movie squanders suspense and momentum, solving its riddles by deflating them.

300 will be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

Snow Dogs is, even by the standards of a tradition that includes "Son of Flubber" and "The Shaggy D.A.," remarkably inept.

A teasing, oblique curiosity of a movie.

Red simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough.

Mr. Belvaux's sensitive, generous way with actors suggests that, with more discipline and less gimmickry, he might have made a single masterwork, and After the Life provides the best support for this assessment.

It is not saying much to point out that the sequel is better than its predecessor (directed by Abdul Malik Abbott), which was crude and amateurish in every way.

The Glass House is hardly insane, just absurd, and the only damage it does is to itself.

Mr. Longley makes powerful use of the techniques of cinéma vérité. The absence of voice-over narration and talking-head interviews gives his portrait of daily life under duress a riveting immediacy.

David Cronenberg's elegant treatise on the metaphysics of violence.

By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.

An easygoing exercise, impossible to dislike but not especially memorable, engaging but finally derivative:

Before Civil Brand erupts into over-the-top melodrama (which is pretty early), it shows some interest in its characters, and in its less screechy moments the dialogue has the rough, bantering ring of actual speech.

A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.

The storytelling is choppy and abrupt, and the filmmakers rely heavily on voice-over narration to announce themes that are never brought to dramatic life on screen. Mr. Ledger, his heartthrob charisma camouflaged behind a heavy beard, gives a stiff, hesitant performance.

The blend of grim violence with romantic whimsy tilts toward sentimentality. Mr. Salles has the confidence of a storyteller too entranced by his tale to worry about the resistance of his audience, which he thus effortlessly overcomes.

Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.

It has a familiar, lived-in feel, and if its observations of rural life at a time of political turmoil don't feel terribly original, they are nonetheless absorbing and sometimes powerful.

Vacillates between cutesy Disney-style anthropomorphism and "Born Free" exoticism.

I call it wondrous because, in spite of lapses and imperfections, a few of them serious, Mr. Burton's movie succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed - even to glut - the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.

After Jimmy Neutron was over, I felt glassy-eyed and a little headachy. But the boy genius who accompanied me to the screening could not take his eyes off the screen. I think he's in his room right now, building a shrink ray to try out on his dad.

To attempt a culinary metaphor, Ms. van der Oest manages a yolky, runny sitcom omelet rather than the airy soufflé of farce.

This is bad cinema and bad history. Ms. Bravo is unstinting in her praise for the omelet and her admiration of the chef, but she refuses to admit that she's walking on eggshells.

The character of Roy Miller is so quintessentially Cruise-ian that he skirts the edges of self-conscious parody.

For all its punches, kicks, whacks and thumps, the movie does not have much impact, and for all its affectionate nostalgia, it produces a strange kind of amnesia. It knocks the sense right out of your head, and its own as well.

Essential viewing for anyone who desires a sense of the finer human grain of a war that now commands the attention of the world as never before.

The film they have put together is dense with sound and information, but it moves with a swift, lilting rhythm that is of a piece with the musical heritage it explores.

Leaves you with a sense of quiet, chastened grace.

Beneath the rough vérité exterior beats the same slick, corny heart.

Sloppy when it should be incisive, indulgent when it should be astringent, and ultimately unsure of what it is mocking and in what spirit.

The movie, for all its prettiness, manages to be shallow and portentous at the same time.

Confuses an empty and derivative stylistic bravura with formal cleverness, and a sterile, mechanistic sensationalism with emotional intensity.

I watched it not as a critic preparing to summarize its merits or flaws to an audience of readers curious whether it was worth their time to see it, but as a sickened and disappointed fan, saying an unsentimental but still sad goodbye to one of her cultural crushes. Under those circumstances, I Love You, Daddy seemed less like a movie than like a series of symptoms presented, with shocking directness, for the viewer’s clinical consideration.

There is very little that is tantalizing or suspenseful. The feeling of revelation is gone, and many of the teasing implications of "Reloaded" have been abandoned.

Honey brings out the wholesome, affirmative side of the hip-hop aesthetic without being overly preachy, and it offers a winningly utopian view of show-business success without real costs or compromises.

The director manages to evade both the stuffy antiquarianism and the pandering anachronism that subvert so many cinematic attempts at historical inquiry.

The passions of "Plata Quemada" are as bold as the images.

Mr. Hogan understands both themes, and his filmmaking style is a perfect mixture of wide-eyed wonder and slightly melancholy sophistication.

There's no buildup, no narrative arc, just one scene of comically debauched partying after another.

In its own modest, genial terms, the picture succeeds: it never wants to be more than charming and sweet, and it invites us to imagine London as a cozy, happy small town where coincidental encounters are everyday occurrences.

For a story that's all about the harnessing of fateful chthonic forces, Paul Thomas Anderson has dug deeper than ever before, and struck black gold.

Secretariat is a by-the-numbers sports-hero picture with an inexpressive hero (horses look great in motion, but they can't carry a close-up) and a preordained outcome.

The nearly flawless execution of a deeply flawed premise.

Like a dream within a dream. Its images and emotions are vivid, disquieting and also hermetic, and while it may frustrate your desire for clear storytelling and psychological transparency, it has an intensity that surpasses understanding.

The ending is meant to be clouded with ambiguity, but really it is unequivocally happy because it means the movie is over.

The latest movie from Spain to use the conventions of the thriller to explore knotty and fascinating philosophical questions.

The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.

Both sweet and stringent, attuned to the wonders of childhood as well as its cruelty and terror.

In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility.

Quantum of Solace, the first bona fide sequel in the Bond series, has the poky pace and expository padding of the middle chapter of a trilogy.

In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.

Just as the vast, square Imax screen magnifies panda-haunches and steep, jungle-clad gorges, its relentless scale also enlarges a half-baked, mediocre little adventure story into something almost grotesquely bad.

There's just not quite enough to the movie: not enough jokes, not enough obstacles, not enough sex.

One of the few recent movies I have seen that plunged me into that rare, giddy state of pleasurable confusion, of not knowing what would happen next, which I associate with the reading and moviegoing experiences of my own childhood. But there is no reason that children should have a monopoly on this primal, wonderful experience.

It cheerfully invites the audience to descend to their level, where no joke is too silly or raunchy, and a plot is just a way of passing time between game levels and bong hits.

Jody's story is told with so much heart -- and his character is acted with such a winning combination of playfulness, vulnerability and sexual dynamism by Mr. Gibson -- that you can forgive the occasionally incoherent storytelling, the overwrought moments and the haphazard, unconvincing excursions into dream and fantasy.

Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.

It's not bad enough to make you curse, but you are likely to laugh when you should scream, and to roll your eyes when you are meant to laugh.

I've seen better movies recently, but it's been a long time since I've left one feeling the easy, full-bellied happiness this one evoked.

Compassionate though it is, this is not a movie that offers much in the way of solace. It insists that there is no end to human weakness, and not much cure for it either. That's pretty strong stuff.

Should have been more polished, and less tame.

Like a perfect, short-lived love affair, its pleasure is accompanied by a palpable sting of sorrow. It leaves you wanting more, which I mean entirely as a compliment.

Finds a sprawling, vivid middle ground somewhere between documentary and myth.

In the end, though, The Ant Bully is adequate rather than enchanting. Unsure of its ability to charm, it compensates with noise, sentiment and low humor, the usual synthetic stew served to children,

The 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing.

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than "Star Wars."

It's amazing to see a film so brazenly experimental, so committed to reflecting on the circumstances and techniques of its making, that is at the same time so intent upon delivering old-fashioned cinematic pleasures like humor and pathos, character and plot.

The humor in Me, Myself and Irene is often outrageous but rarely cruel.

Though well dressed and well made, ultimately falls prey to the contradiction that afflicts so many movies about writers. What makes them so fascinating, so representative, cannot really be shown on screen.

The Wackness may not have much that's new to say about being 17--it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama with a couple of noteworthy performances--but it's a definitive compendium of trivia about 1994 (by Levine's lights, the best year ever).

Like Gekko, the film also feels urgent and strangely necessary.

You can feel frightened and disturbed by this movie without being especially moved by it.

Every so often a movie comes along that's bad in such original and unexpected ways that it inspires an almost admiring fascination

Ms. Giocante's intoxicating mixture of gamine innocence and womanly knowingness is almost too much for the movie - Lila is surely too much for Chimo - but her charisma, and Mr. Doueiri's insouciant, heart-on-the-sleeve style give it a mood that is at once breathlessly romantic and cannily down to earth.

Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.

At best, this film is half-inflated.

Has some funny, dirty-minded jokes, a few amusing cameos (including Julianne Moore in clown makeup) and a soundtrack loaded with juicy cuts of mid-70's vintage soul and funk.

The whole business has a breathless, determined, student-film quality that makes it especially hard to watch. Mr. Cunningham and his cast are clearly trying to do something they feel is important, and there is no pleasure in watching them do it so ineptly.

It's hard to resist being swept up in Blue Crush, not least because David Hennings's shimmery photography carries the breeze and spray of the island right into the theater. The movie is also the latest example of a subgenre that might be called feminexploitation.

If there is heartbreak in this movie, there is also a sense of energy that makes it almost exhilarating.

Z makes political intelligence seem chicer than skinny neckties.

Triumph of Love, Marivaux's 270-year-old romantic comedy, is a beguiling trifle, a gauzy, teasing inquiry into the fungibility of emotions.

Astonishingly well acted film, so much so that it seems unfair to single out any of the performances. Mr. Lawrence's camera sense is as sure and unobtrusive as his feel for acting. The movie just seems to happen, to grow out of the ground like a thorny plant, revealing the intricate intelligence of its design only in hindsight.

Gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn't sure if I needed a drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity.

Mr. Akin pursues his happy, silly love story without embarrassment, and In July is ultimately more endearing than irritating.

The "American Pie" movies succeed where many other comedies aimed at the youth market falter: they manage to be both lewd and sweet, exploiting the natural prurience of young people while implicitly comforting their raging anxieties.

He plies his viewers with plenty of bread -- chewy and, to some tastes, dry and starchy scenes -- but he also scatters petals of whimsy and delight to nourish the senses.

Mr. de Broca's film is full of durable cinematic pleasures: a little sex, a lot of sword fighting and a plot that combines heady passion with complicated political intrigue.

Supporting performances add comic spark to a movie that otherwise seems happily, deliberately second-rate.

A good summer movie isn't just an uninterrupted crescendo of cacophony. You need stuff IN BETWEEN the fireballs and the cyborgs.

It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.

A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving.

Follows a formula, but the formula, when applied with skill and intelligence, as it is here, is pretty much foolproof.

A movie like this can survive an absurd premise but not incompetent execution. And Mr. LaBute, never much of an artist with the camera, proves almost comically inept as a horror-movie technician...It's neither haunting nor amusing; just boring.

It's surely the best depiction of teenage eccentricity since "Rushmore," and its incisive satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking, individualistic land, and also its question-mark ending, reminded me of "The Graduate."

The result is a minor, meandering film.

Ms. Testud's performance, which earned her a César, the French Oscar, for most promising actress, is the source of the movie's lingering, troubling power.

The movie is bulky and inarticulate, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and incoherence.

The burden of the story, which is maudlin and entirely unbelievable, weighs down even the more credible performances.

Parsons himself might have written a surreal, funny-sad ballad about the aftermath of his own death, but Grand Theft Parsons is little more than a surreal anecdote, told in too much detail and without enough soul or imagination to make anything more than a footnote to a legend.

The surface is rough and profane enough, and the acting sufficiently restrained, to cover the sentimental story with a varnish of gritty realism. But stylish bravado and bad-boy performances don't make the film any less predictable.

Ms. Thurman is the one bit of genuine radiance in this aggressively and pointlessly shiny, noisy spectacle.

The gags and subplots, rather than adding up to sustained hilarity, compete with each other.

(Spielberg) tells the story slowly and films it with lucid, mesmerizing objectivity, creating a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams's unusually restrained. modernist score.

Only a sourpuss could fail to be amused by this movie's sight gags and action sequences or to be charmed by its lighthearted good humor.

The Spirit of the Beehive, like "Cinema Paradiso," also takes place at the particular intersection of reality and fantasy defined by youthful moviegoing.

At once somber and mysterious, comical and sad. It shows just how lonely a crowded city can be.

Instead of suspense, there is confusion; instead of intrigue, a lot of inexplicable confrontation among characters whose significance is not so much enigmatic as obscure.

By the end, after an hour and a half of wondering -- sometimes amusedly, sometimes impatiently -- just what this strenuously unconventional movie is supposed to be, you discover that the answer is as conventional as can be.

Mr. Corneau, an eclectic director with a mildly perverse sensibility, turns the conflict of cultures into a psychodrama that is at once lighthearted and intense.

Compared with the psychological probing and spiritual brooding of "Batman Begins," Fantastic Four is proudly dumb, loud and inconsequential.

All of this makes the movie pleasant, but not very memorable - a pale mirror image of "Shopgirl," which touches on some similar themes.

There is really no other way to categorize this splendid, crotchety artifact.

Has the scruffy charm you expect from this kind of picture, and some admirable feminist pluck. But the story is -- forgive me -- a little thin, and the filmmaking clumsy and rushed.

The director has fallen into the common first-timer's trap of biting off more than he can chew, stitching together an unwieldy, disorganized story out of subplots and flashbacks, without paying enough attention to the basic requirements of character and narrative.

If these two can figure out a way to love each other, maybe it isn't necessary for us to like them very much.

If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.

Nobody in it seems organically connected to anybody else. In a movie devoted to the idea that everything and everyone is connected, this is a serious failing, and it undermines Mr. Sayles's noble intentions.

Entertaining without being especially illuminating. If you must see only one documentary about a Slovene philosopher this year, it might be better to read his books.

What Mr. Crowe has done is nonetheless remarkable. He has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see.

The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.

Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.

The tale, in any case, is so gripping, so full of improbable turns and agonizing reversals that it bears repeating, and Mr. Butler and Ms. Alexander tell it straightforwardly and well.

If you're amused by jokes involving male genitals, female pubic hair, flatulence and dismemberment, it should be a big hit.

The movie is a gaudy, noisy thrill ride -- hyperactive, slightly out of control and full of kinetic, mischievous charm.

Lacks both the intellectual rigor and the soulful sublimity of "A.I.," but it nonetheless allows some genuine ideas and emotions to pop up amid the noise and clutter.

Might have been richer and more observant if it were less densely plotted. The characters would resonate more if there were fewer of them, and if they were not pushed through so many contrived dramatic incidents.

Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in "Goldeneye"), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.

A witless, gruesome barrage of jokey violence and lame trans-Atlantic humor, kept moving by the pointless, derivative kineticism of Mr. Yu's hyperactive cuts and splices.

Watching The Five Obstructions is at once like witnessing two chess masters playing dominoes and like spying on a series of therapy sessions. Mr. von Trier clearly sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst.

Drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.

Like a good novel, Les Destinées is many things: a family chronicle, a series of psychological portraits, a sumptuous re-creation of the past. But the film is also a pointed tribute to the French tradition of quality and distinction, a tradition in which it clearly includes itself.

Both grueling and dull. Imagine (if possible) a Pasolini film without passion or politics, or an Almodóvar movie without beauty or humor, and you have some idea of the glum, numb experience of watching O Fantasma.

The movie we've been waiting for all year: a comedy that doesn't take cheap shots, a drama that doesn't manipulate, a movie of ideas that doesn't preach. It's a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs.

Mr. Pettigrew's affection for Fellini and his films animates this documentary and limits its appeal.

Presents an appealing and persuasive picture of European integration, in which national differences, which once sparked military and political conflict, are preserved because they make life sexier and more interesting.

Goes down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.

Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding, the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty.

Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.

Devotees of the series, admirers of Ms. Sedaris and fake-news junkies who can never get enough of Mr. Colbert will find reasons to see it and to convince themselves that it is funnier and more satisfying than it really is. Count me in.

In the end, Loser disappoints.

Jettisoning any ambition toward thrillerhood, Domestic Disturbance becomes a plodding, obvious angry-dad melodrama, ambling toward the final, fatal showdown between parent and usurper.

Rarely has the basic nature of visual perception seemed so frightening.

"Croupier," the director's comeback film of 2000, which also starred Mr. Owen, is a riskier, more interesting exercise in English noir than I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, but the new film, whose title comes from a Warren Zevon song, nonetheless serves as a fine stylistic showpiece.